Are we still tracking creative directors — or are we just pretending?

Creative directors used to stay.
They used to build — not just collections, but languages, systems, silhouettes that outlived trends. A brand’s soul was something you could trace in the way a hemline moved, in the weight of a button. Legacy wasn’t announced — it was quietly layered, year after year.

But permanence is no longer part of the job description.

Take the past year: Alessandro Michele returns — this time not in velvet and brocade, but under the moody lights of Valentino.Demna, who redefined shockwear at Balenciaga, suddenly finds himself on the other side of his own aesthetic cliff. Virginie Viard quietly exits Chanel, leaving behind an archive— and speculation. And Pierpaolo, master of colour-drenched humanism at Valentino, walks into Balenciaga, a house built on distortion and digital detachment.

None of it is accidental. But none of it feels solid either.

Of course, fashion has always evolved. But lately, it feels more like a shuffle than a progression. Designers don’t so much settle into a house as pass through it — leaving behind a few silhouettes, a fleeting mood, a collection title. Sometimes even less.

Houses no longer seem to be searching for a singular vision. They’re after rhythm. Headlines. A face that fits into a carousel post. A spike in attention. A short-term feeling of newness, before the next cycle begins. Vision is welcome — as long as it moves fast and doesn’t take up too much space.

In this climate, the creative director becomes something between a collaborator and a placeholder. The brand remains the star. Designers orbit it, gently — like stylists, like ghosts, like guest editors of their own legacy.

And yet, there’s something fascinating about this disorientation. Some of the most compelling fashion today comes not from mastery, but from misalignment — that rare moment when a designer is still learning the codes, and something half-formed makes it onto the runway. Not quite polished, not quite sure of itself. Honest, in its own way.

Still, the pace is relentless. There’s barely time to inhabit a vision before it’s archived.

Designers have become modern nomads — not without agency, but rarely with permanence.
The houses remain. The names stay intact. The identities, however, flicker — like moodboards refreshed one too many times.
And we, the audience, don’t ask “what is this saying?” so much as “who’s next?”